I spent four years as Forbes' Girl Friday, which to me meant doing a little bit of everything at once. As a member of the Forbes Entrepreneurs team, I looked at booming business and startup life with a female gaze. I worked on the PowerWomen Wealth and Celebrity 100 lists, keeping my ears pricked and pen poised for current event stories--from political sex scandals to celebrity gossip to international affairs. In 2012 I helped to put two South American women on the cover of FORBES Magazine: Modern Family star Sofia Vergara (the top-earning actress on U.S. television) and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who is transforming the BRIC nation into an entrepreneurial powerhouse. Prior to Forbes I was at the Philadelphia CityPaper, where I learned more than any girl ever needs to know about the city's seedier trades. I studied digital journalism at The University of The Arts.
I left Forbes in November, 2013, to pursue other interests on the West Coast.

Every Man You Work With Thinks You Want To Sleep With Him

A new study suggests that—no matter how platonic you imagine a relationship may be—every man you know but aren’t related to is trying to sleep with you. And what’s worse, they think you’re trying to sleep with them right back.

Yes, really.

According to the research, reported on by Scientific American, which looked at 80 man-woman platonic relationships in “emergent adulthood” (read: twenty-somethings), men were more attracted to women than vice versa. Men also consistently and mistakenly assumed that their women friends were harboring a secret sexual crush of their own. The best part? The men surveyed didn’t care if the woman was involved in a relationship; their feelings and assumptions didn’t change.

And while this unique insight into the male brain is troubling for male-female friendships around the world—including your insistence that you “stay friends” with all of your exes—the findings are much more disturbing when put into the context of the workplace. What about the platonic relationships you have with your male colleagues? Do male supervisors believe their female subordinates are in love with them? How does that shape corporate culture, the assessment of female employees and women’s advancement in the office?

My gut tells me this: “Not well.”

Here’s the abstract from the referenced study, published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships by researchers from the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire:

We propose that, because cross-sex friendships are a historically recent phenomenon, men’s and women’s evolved mating strategies impinge on their friendship experiences. In our first study involving pairs of friends, emerging adult males reported more attraction to their friend than emerging adult females did, regardless of their own or their friend’s current relationship status.

Now. If we accept this as true, that guys in their late 20s (and, increasingly, early 30s) are incapable of respecting platonic relationships, the scenario could play out something like this. You’ve worked your tail off all year, meeting quotas and volunteering for projects to prove your commitment to the team. You’ve worked late nights and even weekends to show your supervisor he can count on you. But your boss hasn’t gotten the message; instead, he’s filed those nights and weekends under “romantic pursuit” and your hard-work as pleas for his attention.

Stay with me. Because your boss believes you’ve been working for the last 12 months not to, say, score a plum promotion, but to get into his pants, he’s not going to be thinking about your career, and how big of a role his review plays in your long-term advancement. Not at all. Instead, he’s downplaying your accomplishments and deciding whether or not he should sleep with you. (Because remember, he already believes you’re into it).

And that, dear readers, could be the very reason you didn’t get your last raise.

What do you think? Am I reaching in thinking this study has any impact on workplace relationships? Has this happened to you? Tell me about it.

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Meghan, there’s a lot of classic research on this topic, using various research designs. It’s an interesting topic. I do think you’re generalizing the research a bit, however, when you start expanding the findings to the workplace. Certainly there are creeps in offices, and discrimination, and women (and men) can have their careers impacted negatively by issues relating to sex and attraction. You begin to speculate a bit, but I do understand that you don’t get paid if you don’t fill a page with text that Forbes can sell ads next to.

Everyman you work with thinks you want to sleep with him…….if we agree that this is true of every man in all male – female situations then it would have to be true at the workplace as well. What I believe is that men’s egos need to believe every woman wants them. But snap your fingers–make them come down from their sexual fantasy–and they will admit they know it is not true. So the trick for women in the atmosphere of the oblivious male ego? Find a way to snap your fingers often. When you’re working your butt off to prove you deserve the promotion wake up the oblivious male ego so he see’s the reality; don’t be afraid to initiate quarterly performance reviews of your own so your effort can regularily be linked to clear company and career objectives. Initiating these on your own will have you setting the agenda and tone of the meeting rather than leaving his ego to do so.

Interesting article – however I think the argument is too black & white. Taking into account evolutionary psychology and social dynamics, I would say that there are multiple other factors. The overriding factor is perceived value and status – for women, seeing men through the lenses of ‘lover’ or ‘provider’; and for men, sorting the pecking order between alpha males and beta males. Men will generally want to sleep with female colleagues they find attractive (High value) regardless of their relationship status – because they are genetically hardwired to propagate the species by sleeping with as many high value women as possible. Women, however, are generally more discerning – they will resist, test, and ‘befriend’ those men they see as providers (Beta males) in order to ensure that they and their offspring are looked after. When an alpha male (High value) comes along, a woman will happily sleep with them regardless of relationship status – and will rationalise their actions post the event.

This is animal consciousness at work – survival and replication. What the values of equality and tolerance bring into the corporate world however, is the aspiration to become more human. Understanding and exercising will over the animal passions is the endeavour to wake up and exercise true freedom of choice, however I would hazard a guess to say that most of us blindly follow a genetically pre-determined path.

>> When an alpha male (High value) comes along, a woman will happily sleep with them [sic -- it should be *him*; grammar error!] regardless of relationship status – and will rationalise their [sic -- her; ditto] actions post the event.

Uh, NO — sorry, dude, that’s old-think. Some of us actually ignore the ancient hind brain and do our own thinking, thanks. We usually turn down the high value male if we’re already spoken for or he’s just looking to sleep around. Besides: a guy who doesn’t make the effort to get to know me and see if we have anything in common or I even like him before wanting to sleep with me has just told me that the sex is more important to him than who he’s doing it with, i.e., that the activity is more important than the person, which means the woman is interchangeable, and I’m not worth the effort he’d have to invest — which is a HUGE insult to me! And I don’t take that crap. So whoops! There goes your evolutionary theory. Guess I’m evolving faster than your philosophy. Which means you’re falling behind. *And* you need an editor.

I agree that we have to exercise intelligent thought and freedom of choice; but hasn’t “evolutionary psychology” been used endlessly to excuse (fill in unethical behavior of choice?)

If we think that we are hardwired and that we have a genetically pre-determined path, doesn’t that make the whole concept of ethics academic?

Sorry…but I’ve seen this used a lot lately and I’m beginning to wonder — if you take this argument to its logical conclusion, doesn’t it really mean, “It’s okay to act like (fill in the blank), “because evolution has wired us that way?”

I have to say, I’ve dealt with this many, many times in corporate America. I guess I would have to confess that I have been able to occasionally use it to my advantage by feeding their delusions just a bit. That may sound awful but I think most women do it but won’t admit it. I work in a man’s industry and to get ahead as a woman takes twice as much talent as the men already so I’ll take any leg up I can get!

Nancy, thank you for your honesty about using your sexual charms to extract attention and favors from hapless married betas, who only have the workplace as an outlet for possible interaction with women outside their matrimonial cows.

For free-ranging guys like me though, encountering a woman like you on the job can be very dicey, as overtly ignoring your flirt games likely ends up with you feeling enraged and justified in scheming to kneecap me.

One must strike a delicate and fragile balance between flattering your sexual self-esteem while making sure not to be trapped alone in a room with you. It’s like tip-toeing through a minefield when we are just trying to do our damn jobs!

While I can only speak from my own experience, I believe that kind of attitude is fair.

Seriously. It’s not any different from a regular bootlicker.

Though if I have to say, at least for me, it will, over time, only serve to make men believe women DON’T fancy them and are just toying with them. And frankly that’s the surest way to a fair work environment.